The Boston Shaker opened its doors earlier this month, just steps from the Red Line in Davis Square, offering a solution to the cocktail lover’s wallet-related woes and giving hope to those of us looking to expand our horizon of homemade mixed drinks.

At the end of 2009, Best-Of fever hit hard and we definitely got caught up in it, too. Maybe a little too caught up in it. Despite all the blabbering all over the media about 2009 being the Worst Year Ever, we kind of thought 2009 was pretty cool. Maybe too good. There was too much stuff about it that we loved.

Brunch. Once, the word conjured unsavory images. Steam rising from over-scrambled eggs, unapologetically bland fruit cups of cantaloupe and grape, a hangover intensified by the scent of mimosa.

Not anymore.

I stand in front of a familiar window. Holly, candy canes, and the words “Season’s Greetings” are painted on the glass. Carolers in Dickensian skirts brush past me, singing “Joy to the World.” Fading sun glints on the control tower. A Sky Chefs truck rolls past piles of snow. Christmas has come to Logan Airport.

We’re not sure what’s cooler: being a member of the X-Men, or being a member of LUPEC (Ladies United for the Preservation of Endangered Cocktails). The badass bartenders who belong to the Boston chapter of this national organization have mad skills and huge hearts, and their fall fundraiser was one of this year’s most hotly-anticipated events for Boston’s cocktail-loving crowd.

Among the labyrinths of traffic and Madonna statues in Union Square, Sherman Market is easy to miss. There’s no sign, just a couple of 8.5 x 11 printouts taped to the windows. We walked right past it the first time, and you will too.

Everyone who’s ever eaten an oyster remembers his or her first time. The peer pressure. The slippery substrate coated in blood-red cocktail sauce. The texture of something cold and tongue-like sliding along the roof of the mouth and, ideally, immediately down the esophagus before the brain could trip the gag reflex—or, if one was brave enough to chew it the first time around, the tiny tidal wave of foreign flavors, bursting forth with notes of butter and brine and bits of primordial organs.

JJ Gonson wasn’t always this wholesome. The sister of Claudia Gonson, also known as “the girl in the Magnetic Fields,” she began her adult life as a music photographer and band manager, cooking organic and local food for her rocker buddies and beaus before it was A Thing.

The summer is over. Get over it. Just let go.

Luckily, Arts at the Armory and Somerville Local First have come together to help us get pumped for that brief time of year that comes between life melting humidity and soul crushing cold.

Oh hey did you know that Marshmallow Fluff, the stuff that childhood memories are made of (or at least stuck together with), was invented in Somerville?